Identifying and Nurturing the “Right” Talent

In today’s competitive world, organizations with strong people culture focus their energies inward to identify the Champions who would lead them to leverage the future market growth. Many organizations have invested a considerable amount of money in building the infrastructure to support talent transformation and include practices like Assessment Centre or Development Centre to identify and nurture the talent. 

The practice of Assessment Centre has been around since World War 2 where it was used in military recruitment. In the 1950s, Robert K Greenleaf and Douglas W. Bray of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T), conducted studies on Assessment Centre and incorporated the practice in the corporate world. Since then, a lot of major changes have happened in the practice of the Assessment Centre and it became one of the widely acknowledged tools for Talent Assessment and identification of future talents. 

Currently, most organizations conduct Assessment centres in either Face to Face or Virtual Mediums. In the current pandemic times and keeping into perspective the health guidelines, the Virtual Assessment Centre is favored over the In-Person Assessments. In one of the conversations with a large Multinational Manufacturing company, the Chief People Officer mentioned “Virtual Assessment Centre provides the scale, convenience and cost optimization over traditional assessment centre. However, the cost of tool and report customization is exorbitantly higher.” 

We at LHH believe in the culture of seeking constant feedback to innovate our solutions. We heard our customer and designed an integrated platform where all tools were customized to the Client's business context. The Virtual Assessment Centre was launched in 3 phases covering 1500 participants across Mid and Junior levels. Multiple activities were conducted to ensure the success of the project. A few highlights are – 

• The tools of the Assessment Centre were designed and customized to the Clients’ overall business requirement, roles, and functions 
•  A marketing campaign was designed and implemented to increase the adoption rate
• Multiple Webinars were conducted to create buy-in from functional heads and to create awareness of the process
• Handholding of the Participants to ensure 100% adoption
• Final Report showcased the overall Competency Gaps in the current population, the critical competencies that need to be focused on, overall cohort comparison, comparison with past assessment data and highlighting the talent trends, etc.
• Developing the Internal Talent on the critical competencies by using structured learning interventions. 

This experience gave us the confidence to share this success story and our platform with our ever-growing client base. Today, this practice of customized Virtual Assessment Centre is helping LHH India scale newer heights.